


Marvelous

by thehobblefootalchemist



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Attempted Murder, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Gen, Most of these tags apply later but putting them now to be up-front:, Origin Story, Outright Murder, Pre-Canon, character study with plot
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-14
Updated: 2017-05-16
Packaged: 2018-10-05 05:17:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10298381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehobblefootalchemist/pseuds/thehobblefootalchemist
Summary: Penelope Spectra was once human, with as many emotional complexities and insecurities as any of the patients that ever passed through her office.  By the time she encounters Danny Phantom, she is one of the most insidious and frightening villains he has ever faced.  What of the time in between?  This is one take on what may have happened--how she came to terms with being a creature that must cause others pain in order to live, how she first met Bertrand, and their development of the philosophy that "there's only an 'i' in misery if you spell it that way".





	1. Involving A Mirror

**Author's Note:**

> My Brother's Keeper was always one of my favorite episodes when the show was airing, and recently I've unearthed once again my great fascination with Spectra and Bertrand's characters. Only now, as compared with more than 10 years ago, I have the storycrafting ability to actually do something about that fascination--hence, this fic! It is going to be a long and detailed ride that I've enjoyed every minute of so far and I can only expect that to continue.

She would realize only much later that the great breath she had taken into her lungs upon waking had not exactly been made up of air. And neither, for that matter, had it exactly gone into anything resembling her lungs as she’d known them. But confusion and panic were the order of the day, first. What had been that sensation of crashing…?

Her wild glances about the room didn’t tell her much. _Am I…home?_ The living room couch under her was as she remembered it feeling when she’d nodded off upon it the night before. Nothing looked out of place on the bookshelves. The television was off, the blinds drawn—everything just the same as always.

The problems began when she attempted to stand up, and

_there was screaming all around her, lights flickering and an unholy cracking sound_

she nearly blacked out from the effort. A great weariness overtook her, as if she’d taken on a fistfight with a mob, and on reflex she pressed the heels of her palms into her temples. She knew she’d not been feeling her best lately, but this kind of exhaustion first thing in the morning was frankly ridiculous. What was she taking all of those vitamins for if spells like this were still possible?

When she opened her eyes again she noticed something that made her yelp. Her hands and arms were black—ink black, coal black, blacker than how she took her coffee. The affliction extended as far up her skin as she could see. And indeed she found that that was very far: inexplicably she appeared to have woken without a single item on her body of the outfit she’d put on before bed.

What was this?! She lived with no one, so there was no way this could be some kind of sick joke, and though insomnia plagued her from time to time she had never in her life been prone to sleepwalking or any other kind of malady that would result in her causing herself such a condition with no memory of it. How—

She’d made another attempt to scrabble from the couch but lost her balance and pitched forwards. Preparing for pain ended up doing nothing; the impact she’d expected of her face colliding with the coffee table never came. Instead, she… _was floating._

At this point she really felt as if she should have been hyperventilating, but somehow even a single, normal breath was too much to hope for. Someone had replaced her throat tissue with a block of barbed wire and not a sound was going to get past it, let alone air.

She had no clothing, no legs, holy god her lower body tapered off into nothing _she had no legs_ , and was apparently able to take all of this in from a comfortable position of a foot—off—of—the—damn—floor.

“What the hell is going on?” she managed to whine, the supplication becoming higher in pitch with every time she repeated it. “What in the hell, what the _hell_ —”

The mirror, she had to find her mirror. It would reflect her as she really existed, not whatever this was that she was being tricked into seeing. Latching onto that notion tighter than a drowning woman to a life preserver she made her best efforts towards getting to her bedroom. It was near-impossible to get around in physics she wasn’t used to but resolutely buying into the fact that this had to be a nightmare gave her the strength to make herself figure out the best method to this _gliding_ business. There were a few starts and stops, or more accurately a few starts and accidental hittings of walls when she couldn’t help drifting off course, but she got there in the end.

Behind her, unnoticed in all the duration of this, her apartment’s front door glowed with soft lilac light.

For the past decade and a half her mirror had been less a friend than a reminder. It served neither function now, apparently having taken upon itself to graduate to outright enemy: she appeared exactly as she had seen herself in the living room, only now she had the added terror of seeing what had become of her face.

If she’d not possessed her memories, the absolute sense of self that existed in her mind, she would not have been able to process that the form reflected back at her in the glass had indeed to be her own. Her face was gone. Or rather, it had changed beyond her recognition. Nearly every feature she’d called hers throughout her life was absent, smoothed over in favor of the obsidian sheen that now seemed to make up the rest of her, and any trace of her hair was lost in favor of a flame-like substance that swept upwards from just past her forehead. And her eyes…as she looked into the mirror, only pits of red stared back.

She was as frozen as one could be when suspended in midair. Why was she not waking up? There had never been a dream so bad that she couldn’t claw her way back to reality from it. This should be no different—any second now, she was sure of it, she was going to wake up sweat-soaked amongst her sheets, feeling gross but very much okay, and very much _not_ looking like a nightmarish ink drawing come to life, thank you _very much_.

…any second now.

The face of her alarm clock was in the mirror’s reflection too. Its bright white markings, once they caught her attention, did not show what she expected they would, and she felt her blood go cold (or whatever it was that she had instead of blood now, because distantly she realized that not once in this whole experience had she felt any organ doing any sort of the hammering that was completely called-for in a situation as terrifying as the one in which she found herself).

The little label in the clock’s corner read P.M. The numbers therefore indicated it was past noon.

This made no sense to her, not until the puzzle came its awful way together and its picture showed an entirely different nightmare to the one she’d presumed. This was still the day she thought it was, but her mind had thus far been a good many hours and a dose of amnesia behind. But she remembered now. She remembered

_the shaking beginning, the groaning of metal wrenching away from its supports, someone’s hysteric shout of “QUAKE!”_

that what had happened that had last taken her from a state of consciousness had not been sleep. This wasn’t a dream, and neither was it morning. She had gone to work already that day. And at just past ten A.M., the fault line beneath the city had given way.

She had no heart in her chest that could stop but she experienced an equivalent feeling nonetheless, and once she started screaming that was the last thing Penelope Spectra was conscious of for a very long time.


	2. Involving A Venture

Her blinds weren’t moving.

That, of all things, was the detail in all of this that Penelope’s mind chose to hold onto and rail against. No matter how she yanked upon or swore at them, the normally flimsy little barriers lying over the windows would not respond to her desire to see beyond her apartment. It was a mundane thing perhaps, to be pissed off at, but her storied career in psychology whispered to her that the mundane was exactly the kind of thing she needed to be focused on right now in order to prevent further breakdown.

That she was still malformed was the crux of the issue. In comparison to that Penelope almost didn’t care that she suspected she was _dead_ as well. She hadn’t wanted to believe them at first, but the knives of memory regarding the accident had eventually been inarguable as symptoms of post-traumatic stress of some sort, and she started trying to accept them as the flashbacks as they were. That would be the quickest route to getting her mind back on track. But her body, her _body_ …

These goddamn _blinds_. Resolutely she zeroed in on them again. That faint greenish glow emanating from under them was getting as tiresome as it was unnerving. Was it too much to ask that she could just see what on earth was causing it? That would be a safer route than wandering out through the door—something told her she wasn’t quite ready to step outside just yet.

A slightly hysteric laugh bubbled up in her throat. ‘Step’ outside, that was a funny notion. She still hadn’t figured out what had happened to her legs, and here she was reflexively thinking about stepping. Penelope almost bit her lip to stop the sound before she remembered that her teeth were no longer safe to take such action with.

“Why am I like this?” she asked no one. “If I’m dead, fine, but an elevator doesn’t do _this_ to somebody. So why in the world…”

What categorically did not help the situation was that she could feel herself getting more and more tired as time crawled by, and this fact also made no sense to her. If indeed she was some type of…undead entity, now, what use was there for her to have an energy meter? A corpse possessed neither the means nor reason to become exhausted, surely?

That she was even having these debates with herself was a sign of how far gone she was, Penelope knew. But she also supposed that it didn’t really matter, not when she was so alone. It was just an audience of her and herself for her intellectual degeneration and that suited her just fine.

Well…for now, anyway. She couldn’t deny that she wasn’t a _teensy_ bit curious about how things were going to play out now that she was supposedly deceased. Were there others like her? she wondered. Was there a whole other plane out there that she was going to be able to see now? Social interaction was something she freely admitted she’d had little use for in her later years, but she had a feeling she might be able to make an exception nowadays if it was _ghosts_ she was going to be talking with.

Penelope paused, blinking. In all of this, she’d just realized that that had been her first use of the word ‘ghost’. Looking down at herself, she considered if that was perhaps the best term to use here. She’d never heard of one manifesting as nothing but a shadow, but she did have to admit she had all of the other hallmarks: a lower half that misted out into nothing, a general ethereal glow, the ability to float without regards to traditional gravity…

Well this was a paradigm shift.

Still, though, she didn’t like it. “Why do all the other ghosts in pictures and such get to look sort of like themselves?” she murmured, gazing at her pointed fingertips. “What was wrong” –the word was stumbled over— “what was wrong with me that I turned out like this?”

Her apartment remained as silent as it had done for all of her other beseeching. Dust motes floated in the air alongside her, occasionally flashing green in the eerie light filtering through the windows she could not see out from.

\---

She was very, very put off by the fact that her front door was purple.

Penelope had been considering it for a long while, stretched out horizontally four feet in the air with her chin resting upon her crossed forearms. For all intents and purposes it _looked_ like her door, like it was as she’d locked it behind herself on the way to work that unfortunate morning…save for the fact that the wood had decided to shine a color on the very opposite of the spectrum that it usually did.

That, combined with the way her blinds were continuing to disobey her, was contributing to her growing suspicion that this might not in fact be her apartment after all—at least not as she’d known it while she’d been living. All kinds of horror movie clichés had been marching through her thoughts after that notion had occurred to her. Any other day and she’d have dismissed them out of hand as ridiculous, but on a day where one had awoken as a ghost it lent credence to the possibility that anything truly did go. And in that light, well, the ridiculous gained a whole new potential adjective, that adjective being ‘sinister’.

She sighed, unhappy with this impasse. Purple didn’t used to be a sinister color. Purple had been the color of her childhood room’s walls, was the color of her current bedspread. It had used to mean safety and comfort. Now it seemed to whisper promises of great unknowns, but those unknowns would be hiding just as much as they showcased, she was sure.

It got to where her frailty was the deciding factor. Penelope had no clue whether ghosts were supposed to or even could eat, but it was becoming clear that she would need to find some form of sustenance or she wasn’t going to be able to move very far. In addition to her general fatigue her skin—which body-wide had become smooth and dark as volcanic glass—was beginning to take on the texture of construction paper, and she had no desire to find out if it would damage as easily.

And so outside it was… Her door gave her no such qualms as her blinds had, and opened with apparent gladness to allow her to pass through.

Considering the matter later, Penelope rather thought that nothing on earth—no description, no documentary, _nothing_ —would have been able to prepare her for the sight greeting her outside what she’d assumed was her apartment building. Instead of the dingy parking lot there was instead a sheer drop, a fall down, down, down into absolute nothingness that would have sent her stomach flipping had she possessed one anymore. As it was she backtracked furiously and clung tight to the doorknob, afraid in spite of her ability to float that the abyss was going to claim her.

Little details eventually began to puncture the blanket of fear. Hers was not the only door in the area: dozens more of varying sizes hung mid-air (was it air?) nearby, and occasionally an outcrop of land was visible amidst the distant green-black haze that extended on to the horizon (she firmly labeled it a horizon despite the fact that by normal definition there _didn’t appear to be one_ , ignoring for now the evidence of her senses because she’d so far kept an admirable grip on her sanity and didn’t intend to let that tenuous hold go just yet, if you please).

“Okay,” she breathed from her continued stock-still position curled up against the doorframe. “Okay…it’s just a bit of flooding, nothing you haven’t suggested to hundreds of patients down the line. You can do this, Penelope…”

With hesitance of motion even a sloth would have praised she detached herself from the doorway and tentatively glided a few feet out into the strangeness. It was a little like swimming…only this was the deepest pool she’d ever been in, and she had no idea what may or may not live in its depths.

“…Hello?” she called out, smashing the objection inside her that was yelling about how this was another horror trope that she was falling into. It couldn’t hurt to see if there was any entity out there on her level of sentience. And in any case she felt reasonably confident she could see something hostile coming from far enough off to have enough time to fly back into the space resembling her apartment. “Hey!” she tried, a little louder, “If anybody’s there, can you show yourself?”

From a distance to her left, a creaking sound: one of the other purple doors had opened, just a crack. “Who’s that out there?” a voice called back, wary almost to the point of sounding aggressive.

Despite the tone, she was undeterred. “My name’s Penelope. Can you—”

“Penelope?!” The door was thrown wide, a man’s form shooting out towards her with such speed that it couldn’t stop itself on time and ended up flailing to its eventual halt, almost running clean into her in the process.

“ _Arthur?_ ” Penelope was briefly speechless—it had occurred to her vaguely that she couldn’t have been the only one who’d died in the earthquake, not with the way the building had come down, but she’d never expected to run into one of her coworkers in this place. He looked far more like how she’d earlier been considering a ghost should look: mostly like his former self, save for a dreadful pallor and of course that factor of transparency.

While she’d been inspecting him, Penelope had come under her own scrutiny. “Yeah, it’s me,” Arthur replied somewhat breathlessly. “But, um…” His eyes couldn’t seem to stop going up and down her form. “Can I really be sure that’s you? I mean, it’s just, aside from your voice, you’re…uh…”

He almost sounded afraid, and beneath that there was something else in his tone, something her mind immediately came up with a word for, and that word was _aversion_. Her brittle composure cracked a little, and she made use of its shards’ sharp edges. “I’d appreciate not being questioned on it. Need I go into how big an ass you made of yourself at the last office get-together?”

“Hey, now…” He raised his hands sheepishly. “I didn’t mean anything by it, you don’t have to go into all of that. It’s just…this is all _bonkers_ , you know? What the hell _is_ this? What the hell are _we_?”

After glancing about to make sure there weren’t any unwelcome visitors on their way to barging into their conversation, Penelope shared her suspicions with him. “I think we bought it, Arthur, all of us who were in that elevator. And probably more besides, if the level of shaking was anything to go by.”

His eyes went wide, and he seemed to sag in the air. “I didn’t want to think about it that way,” he moaned. “That’s not… _no_ …”

Having already gotten used to the idea, it actually grated on her a bit to have to watch her coworker process the fact that he’d died. Handholding was not a thing Penelope Spectra was known for. “Yes,” she said, not outright unkindly but still booking no argument. “That crash killed us, and this… _place_ is some kind of afterlife.”

In spite of the fact that no afterlife she’d ever heard of looked like this one, or had seemed like it would be populated by monsters like this one came across as potentially hosting, that was the explanation that made the most sense to her now that she’d found somebody she’d worked with. On the wake of those epiphanies she could feel a new goal forming, the beginnings of a plan coalescing in the back of her mind.

“But I don’t want to be dead,” Arthur whispered, and Penelope glared at him.

“You think I have any more love for this than you do? The faster you get a grip on yourself the faster we can see if anybody else from work has ended up here too. Or did you want to go back to your room and stay by yourself for the rest of however long an existence we have now?”

He gulped and shook his head vigorously, and so it was that the two ghosts cooperatively picked a direction and made their first foray into the glowing black-green.

\---

Of the seven that had been in the elevator at the time of the crash, Penelope and Arthur found that four in total had made the crossing to this new plane: themselves, a man named Ryan, and the building’s front desk receptionist Melanie. Melanie and Ryan had already made contact with one another and worked out their own demises by the time the two groups had found each other, which diffused the tension of the meeting somewhat. However, due to the nature of the appearances of several in the party, there were some awkward glances and silences thrown about—Melanie, like Arthur, had retained near-identical features to how she’d looked while alive, but Ryan had not been so lucky. His clothing was ragged, the digits of his hands and feet all ended in claws, and his jaw possessed a definite muzzle-like shape. All in all he looked downright ghoulish.

And yet still it was Penelope who seemed to garner the most unease. Even when they’d been with one another a good few hours she still caught the others giving her hastily-averted stares—as if she was the thing to be scared of, here! When standing—floating—next to a fairly zombiefied Ryan she hardly thought that was fair. Hell, the other two even seemed to be treating him with _sympathy_ , but of course not a jot of that was thrown in her direction.

Though, if she was being honest with herself, sympathy would likely have inflamed her anger just as much as this poorly-hidden leeriness was doing. What did they have to be feeling so high and mighty about? This form wasn’t _that_ much a step down from her old one.

…was it?

A tendril of anxiety curled to life in Penelope’s chest, and did not diminish no matter what internal bluster she used in attempt to make it wither.

\---

“What,” Ryan roared, “in the _bloody hell_ was that?!”

“Be quiet, Ryan, it does us no good to—”

“You wanna talk about good?! Just what about this past week has been GOOD, Arthur?!”

Penelope no longer had ears to cover, so she just jammed the heels of her palms against her eyes instead. Their party of four had just had their first encounter with something truly monstrous. In the seven days since they’d met each other the little band had come across other ghosts, cementing (despite some of their number’s dread at the fact) that they truly were dead, but had generally kept outright confrontation with any of the evidently natural-born entities to a minimum; it seemed that as long as you didn’t encroach on somebody’s territory, most of the inhabitants of what they’d learnt was called the Ghost Zone were quite content to leave one another be.

That, however, was only a general state, as they’d just come to be taught the hard way. Not every ghost was apparently on their level of sanity—Arthur had crossed a line that had been invisible to their eyes but very important to the slavering beast that had bowled him over and sunk its teeth into his shoulder. A fight had broken out, then, if you could label it a ‘fight’ when it was more a case of trying to flee with the least amount of maiming wounds that you could. Melanie had spontaneously figured out she was capable of emitting some kind of weaponized energy from her palms that had slowed the creature down a little, but inexperience won out in its favor and Melanie had had to bolt right along with the rest of them.

They were holed up now in a cave formation that the nearest floating mountain possessed while they waited for the creature to stalk home, and were fighting amongst one another instead. Ryan and Arthur couldn’t seem to stop shouting at each other, and Melanie looked like she’d have been crying if she’d possessed the tear ducts anymore to do so while she attempted to see to the gory wound in Arthur’s shoulder. To all of their surprise and revulsion, it was ‘bleeding’ green.

Penelope allowed them to go at it as long as she could stand, but eventually enough was enough. “Quiet!” she finally yelled, loud enough to cut over their ridiculous bickering and with sufficient feeling that it actually succeeded in shutting them up for a few seconds. “Now I know only one of you is past thirty,” she said emphatically, “but this childishness needs to stop. We already decided last week that we’re not going to make it very far in this place if we can’t play nice, hm?”

The men still looked angry, but also appropriately abashed, and that pleased her. Floating over to them, she continued speaking.

“Ryan, forget about Arthur’s mistake—he’s already paying for it enough with that injury, I imagine. And Arthur, lay off of Ryan, he’s just freaked out and he has every right to be. None of us expected that we’d be in more danger after our deaths than we ever were in our lifetimes. We just have to deal with it, and the first step to doing that is not laying into each other.”

Penelope could feel her words working—the atmosphere in the cave was subdued now, quiet misery rather than high-friction anger. That suited her far better.

“Let’s call a rest for the time being, huh?” she went on. “Melanie, you can finish doing what you can for that bite, and then we can appoint someone to take watch while the others get some sleep. We’re going to need to be well rested when we make our next go of getting out of that brute’s territory.”

A chorus of downcast muttering signaled agreement to her plan. Penelope ended up taking the first watch, which again suited her very well.

“It’ll be better when you wake up,” she assured Arthur, reaching out to squeeze his uninjured arm as he passed by in search of a good sleeping spot. “That’ll knit just fine, and you’ll be at full strength again whenever there’s another threat.”

He merely grunted, and when she turned away Penelope found herself nearly nose to nose with Melanie.

“Are you sure about that?” the other woman whispered, with a fearful glance in Arthur’s direction. “That something that bad’ll really end up okay?”

“Hey,” she began, laying her palms on Melanie’s shoulders. “These bodies seem sturdy enough. I mean, it would take a lot for a ghost to die _again_ , right?”

Her eyes were on the ground. “I suppose so…”

Penelope gave her one more pat on the arm before sending her along, floating more towards the cave entrance to take up a good watch spot. Not too close—she didn’t have a wish to be seen by anyone, or any _thing_ —but enough so that she could see a few of the dimension’s swirling horizon patterns as something to keep her eyes busy.

That had been extremely, extremely lucky. To have gotten to touch not just one of them, but two, and while they were in such a state? She had hardly felt so good all _week_.

Not that she didn’t feel the tiniest pinprick of guilt in the mental sense…but after all, she hadn’t been the sole architect of the misery in this instance, so it wasn’t all her doing this time around. She had just guided it, there at the end.

Penelope sighed. _Here I am rationalizing again._

But what else would someone do upon realizing that their state of physical health seemed dependent on being an emotional leech?

She had discovered the ability on the second day the group had begun traveling as a unit, though she hadn’t recognized it for what it was until its occurrence happened several times. She’d been near to blacking out from her not only persistent but nose-diving exhaustion when Melanie had caught her arm, and the worry in the other’s features had just seemed to—Penelope had immediately begun feeling invigorated, able to carry on a little better where she’d been on unconsciousness’ door seconds before.

It had been on the fourth time that someone had helped her with her mysterious malady that she had noticed the big thing: that not only could she adeptly tell what one of the others was feeling when they had contact with her…she could practically _taste it_.

And from there…well. It was no large jump for a woman who’d chosen therapy as a vocation because she enjoyed being around those worse off than herself to begin using such a talent with little hesitation. Penelope still didn’t seek to outright cause miserable feelings in the others, but she wasn’t above manipulating them to her advantage if they were already existent. And lord knew that wasn’t hard here, not in a place like the Ghost Zone.

She’d even gotten to the point where she thought that she didn’t so much mind existing like this. There honestly hadn’t been a lot going for her back on the human plane—even with the dangers she was having a better time now as a ghost than she’d had in more than a decade. The company _was_ fast growing stale, but they still were providing a reliable source of ‘food’, so…

Yes, Penelope thought as her eyes followed one of the far-off spirals of fog. Overall she counted things as perfectly splendid.


	3. Involving A New Acquaintance

“Why are we even heading this way?”

Penelope was careful to keep her expression neutral, but behind her purpled lips her teeth were tightly grit. This again?

“I mean, the further away we go from where we started out the less safe it feels,” Ryan continued. “Whose bright idea was it to leave?

Penelope halted mid-air, pivoting to face his poorly hidden accusations full on. “Mine,” she needlessly reminded him, more than aware he remembered fully well but seeing it as an opportunity to turn this whining back around. “And you all agreed, because as I recall there wasn’t a one of you who wasn’t at the very least intrigued about the Ghost Zone. Where did that go?” She made a point of making eye contact with all of them in turn. “Is around three weeks all it takes to be homesick for the place you first woke up? The place, need I remind you, that’s only function appears to be to remind us all of the lives we left behind? The loved ones you lost?”

She of course had had no one left alive or cared-about to lose, but for the sake of her argument she tacked that bit on at the end—she could tell by the way Melanie’s lip was trembling that it was going to be effective. Drifting over to her, she took the other woman’s arm as she eyed Ryan and continued speaking. “As far as I can tell, those rooms are just a crutch. Ones we can’t afford to lean on if we’re going to learn to survive in this place.”

“She’s right,” Arthur put in sullenly. “My room back there was…well it felt safe, but…” He looked at his feet. “The mantelpiece still had all of my pictures…my family…”

For the briefest of moments Ryan’s eyes appeared to flash a different color. But then it was gone, blinked away to show nothing but vivid green again. “I just don’t like not knowing where we’re going,” he growled. “What’s our endgame?”

“Ooh, a game? Can I play?”

Every single one of them looked up in unison—a fifth ghost had unbeknownst to them been privy to their conversation, floating about a dozen feet above them with a curious look upon its face. The speaker appeared to be male, human-shaped but his age indeterminate, and though his posture was casual that did nothing to put any of them more at ease.

Ever the aggressive type, Ryan called him out first. “What are you doing, eavesdropping like that? Is _anything_ private here?”

“If you know where to situate yourself,” the other ghost replied, blithe as could be. He floated down to their level. “But I mean, can you really blame me here? You guys are kind of right out in the open.”

Penelope’s brow was furrowed. “Who are you?” she asked slowly. “And what do you want?”

“See, _you_ know how to get to the heart of a matter. I like that.” He beamed at her. “I’m afraid I can’t answer that first bit, though, seeing as even I don’t know—I mean I know I’m a ghost, from what everybody’s been saying, but darn if I can remember whatever got me that put me here.”

“You mean you don’t remember how you died?” That piqued her curiosity as much as his demeanor did. They’d met ghosts who had feigned friendliness before only to attack later, but something about this one seemed…more sincere. Either he was a far better actor than they’d yet seen or he really was chuffed to introduce himself.

“Not a jot,” he confirmed, shrugging. “I’ve just been floating my merry way about for, oh…I don’t know, six months now? That’s why I stopped when I heard you all talking about exploring. If you don’t mind extra company, I can show you some really cool places.”

The four of them exchanged looks. None of them had ever considered taking on another member. Ryan still looked irritated, and Melanie and Arthur dubious, but Penelope found herself entertaining the notion with more enthusiasm than she’d expected. If he turned out not to be dangerous it would honestly be a bit of fresh air to have a new personality around, and she could hardly say no to another potential food source—it was getting slightly harder to keep finding excuses for making physical contact with the same three individuals. That she’d been able to with Melanie just now had been a lucky break.

“Cool places like what?” she tried, hoping whatever his answer would be would sway the others.

He grinned. “Ever seen an ectoplasm nebula? Or found the energy wellspring yet?”

That latter option had all of their attention immediately. “Energy well?” Arthur repeated, a note of eagerness in his tone that the new ghost did not miss.

“Mmhm—it’s like an oasis for us. All you’ve gotta do is fly close enough, and all of your wounds heal at lightning speed. Sometimes you get a power boost, too.”

It almost sounded too good to be true, but even Ryan was looking like he might want to give it a shot. He, possessing the greatest natural physical strength, had been doing most of the group’s close-combat fighting when confrontations turned nasty. “Say we follow you,” he allowed, flexing the clawed fingers of one hand. “What d’you have to get out of it?”

The ghost looked bemused. “Not everybody here operates on a model of gain, you know. But” –here he looked to each of them in turn, his eyes lingering a tad longer than anyone else on Penelope– “I think it’d be nice to finally make some friends.”

Penelope didn’t know what to make of that statement, not least because of the fact that this ghost’s had been the first pair of eyes not to look at her like she was something to be repelled by.

Ryan meanwhile had been busying himself asking everyone’s opinion on whether to let this newcomer tag along with them. He himself had appeared convinced by the promise of power, Arthur said yes mostly to go along with what Ryan had decided, and Melanie told them she didn’t mind just so long as they all got out of the open soon. When it came her turn Penelope gave assent as well, and thankfully no one seemed to notice the note of distraction in her voice.

“By the way, fella,” Arthur spoke up as they all got to flying again, “we never got your name.”

“I don’t have one to give,” came the jovial reply. “Told you” –he tapped his head– “nothing up here but for what’s happened since I woke up in this place. I honestly haven’t really felt like picking one, either, and would appreciate if you would refrain from doing the same—I feel the lack of definition suits me.”

Penelope raised a brow. In spite of the airs he put into it something about the comment seemed a bit high and mighty, though she was hard-pressed to figure out what set off that impression. _I’ll keep a watch on him,_ she decided.

And as happenstance would have it, she got precisely that opportunity when they came to a stop for rest after a few hours more of flying—it was Penelope who drew first watch.

“So this place really doesn’t have an end?” Melanie was asking as they set up sleeping spots.

“Not as far as anyone’s been able to find,” the nameless ghost replied. He was already stretched out, seeming to prefer doing so in mid-air rather than to lay himself upon the ground like the others. “Every time you think you’ve gone as far as you can go there’s something more beyond your eyes, and another traveler who’s come from just as far in the other direction.”

“Wow…”

The other woman seemed equal parts frightened and fascinated, and Penelope wished so badly that she was close enough to be able to make use of that fear for feeding. She could feel her strength beginning to degenerate again, and the start of that slide always gave her not-insignificant terror of her own—but she had, however, of course found that she was incapable of using her own emotions for fuel. In other late-night watches (not that this dimension had traditional ‘night’) she had begun to ponder if that meant that she was cursed, in a way. None of the other ghosts they’d run across had the same energy needs as she did; everyone else appeared to garner sufficient replacement from the ectoplasm in the realm’s atmosphere.

Would a different person than her have just let themselves wither away, she wondered, upon finding out that their sustained life seemed to depend on direct draining of other people’s? Penelope was well-read enough to know that her situation wasn’t unlike certain vampire tales. But you weren’t like to find any of those stories ending with the vampire staking themselves through the heart, even the ones who hadn’t become the way they were by choice.

…was that what made them the monsters?

With a vigorous mental shake Penelope brought her thoughts back around to where they were supposed to be. Everyone was sleeping, now, and she wanted to keep a damned weather eye on the newcomer—this ghost who seemed so polite on the surface and yet in her eyes had also shown a certain capacity for smarm.

But he just…floated there. A full hour passed and he remained as serene and nonthreatening as could be.

Penelope eventually grew bored. As a result of that boredom a sense of security grew as well, so much so that when Melanie began mumbling from another nightmare, she felt quite fine floating over and laying her palm _just_ close enough to the other woman’s ankle that she could finally make use of some of that insecurity and fright. May as well make those night terrors have _some_ positive outcome, right? In particular because these wee-hour feedings had allowed her to notice something—something potentially huge.

While some others in their group had been honing certain apparently special powers—Ryan his strength and Melanie her blossoming ability to snipe others with energy from her palms—Penelope had initially not noticed anything intrinsic to her own new abilities other than her talent for making herself feel physically better out of others experiencing angst. But the week prior, in the hours after comforting Melanie after a particularly powerful nightmare, she had felt it: something in her body that reminded her of static electricity, a feeling she’d eventually come to realize was a new kind of energy that was demanding that she use it. And when she’d finally figured out the correct channel to do so…

She had found that she could make her hand appear human again.

So far it had only been her hand but the occurrence had been staggering, and Penelope wished for nothing much past being able to find out if eventually it could be more. She was showing signs of being able to _shapeshift_ , for god’s sake. Though it nauseated her somewhat to actually watch the morphing of her body happening, who wouldn’t want to find out how far that could go?

The only issue was that it seemed to require she absorb a particularly large quantity of negativity. As everyone grew slowly more comfortable in the Ghost Zone, barring the occasional outburst of doubt, that was becoming exquisitely difficult to come by. At least from her former coworkers… She finally released her light grip on Melanie’s leg, unwilling to risk absorbing any more for now lest the woman wake up and her intricate charade fell down around her. If history taught anything it was that sabotage of resources only led to famine.

In the time she had left before she needed to wake Arthur she experimented with her new ability some more, watching each finger one by one be free of and then fall back into shadow form, and allowing the wistfulness she normally had to hide show clearly upon her face.

\---

In being led by him to a wellspring of energy, they found that Nameless (as Penelope had taken to referring to him in her head) was himself a wellspring of information. Flying with him was like being subject to a Ghost Zone history lesson. He had no problem answering any questions put to him, and indeed would burst forth unprompted into a topic on any occasion the fancy took hold. So far such topics had included the nature of ectoplasm and how it contributed to the makeup of their bodies, an outlining of the concept of ghostly lairs, and a verbal sketch of the territories as he understood them on their way to their destination.

These traits were admittedly endearing, but also confusing in their own way. In the occasionally literal ghost-eat-ghost world they’d fallen into it was nothing short of odd to have come across someone so willing to blurt out trade secrets, as it were. Penelope was the only one in the group who seemed to be getting these vibes, however, so she had the good sense to keep her off-put instincts to herself. After all it was entirely conceivable that she was being _too_ paranoid.

Not _likely_ , but conceivable.

Three days into having traveled with him they’d begun allowing Nameless inclusion in their watch schedules. So far he’d been as keen and alert as any of them—Penelope had made absolutely sure of that, having remained awake in secret through the first few of them to see if he was going to pull anything funny. But no, perfect marks all around.

She struck up conversation with him now, eager to get him talking again as they flew. “So you say that from here we’re about half a day away?”

“Yep!” he called back. “There’s a den of monsters we’ve got to skirt on the way there, but that’s easily done, and we should get there before our next round of sleep.”

“Monsters?” Melanie all but squeaked, and was echoed in much more suspicious tones by Ryan.

“What?” Nameless did not brush off their concerns, but seemed confused by them nonetheless. “It’s no biggie! I’ve been around there a good few times by now, you can trust me to get you around by the right route.”

He looked straight at Penelope as he spoke there at the end, and even under careful scrutiny she could find no lie in his expression. “It does him no good to be untruthful about it,” she reasoned to the group at large. “He’d be just as much in danger as us if something went wrong.”

A general murmur of assent passed through the party, and they continued flying. After a few minutes’ quiet Nameless came up alongside her.

“Hey, thanks for sticking up for me,” he said quietly. “Means a lot.”

Again, no hint of anything but sincerity. She gave him a light tease. “Happy to, just so long as I’m not in the wrong later—that doesn’t happen often, and we’d both regret it being your fault.”

Even though to the wrong ears her words could certainly have been taken as a threat, Nameless was quite like her and saw the humor in it: he laughed. “No worries about me ever messing with you. I promise.”

Unbidden, Penelope thought back to part of their first true conversation with one another.

_“Your last name is Spectra? Really?”_

_“Mmhm.” The irony of it had not escaped her, had in fact already been made the butt of a few jokes prior to his arrival, and she told him as much._

_“Hey, I’m not making fun. If anything that’s sincerely fitting—like you were meant to be here.” He smiled at her. “You belong.”_

Belonging…that was a strange notion to her. In the last years of her life especially Penelope hadn’t felt much like she belonged anywhere. She’d kept very few acquaintances outside of work, and within work her contacts didn’t extend past professionalism or necessity. Even her apartment had been little more than a place to sleep.

And yet here she was not even a month later, flying under her own power through an otherworldly dimension she was coming to unreservedly enjoy being a part of and being very near, she rather thought, to making an actual friend.


End file.
